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Gandhian Economics : An Overview |
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By K. K. Sinha & Uma Sinha
Gandhian Economics: The Genesis
While Britain and its
revolution created the economics of wealth (Adam Smith, 1977), the economics
of poverty of Gandhi was the product of colonial rule which developed long
after it. In Britain newly invented machines helped small producers to
produce fast with only competitive profits to them and full wages to the
workers in the factories. Fast production by machines created market groups
or the merchant class (Banias) who played middlemen between consumers and
reasonable and brought sellers and buyers together in the market at
reasonable price.
The market economics
of Industrial Revolution was thrust on the poor countries, which became
colonial markets for their capitalist class. Eventually the workers in
factories had to work on decreasing share in production, and the consumers
had to face rising prices as competition among sellers dwindled. This was
foreseen by Marx by 1848, but it proved a little premature in Europe as
workers remained employed at adequate wages and there was full competition
to keep the prices low. Marx’s Manifesto was not accepted as a theory of
poverty on that account.
Dadabhai Naoroji
(1886), Mahadeo Govind Ranade (1898) and Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1907) became
the precursors of the Gandhian School with a Drain Theory and economics of
self-reliance, Gandhian system thus developed as protest to imperial and
colonial exploitation rather than as a class struggle between haves and
have-nots. This echoed more truly the pangs of poverty in vast rural areas
of the colonies.
Gandhi with his Hind
Swaraj written in 1906 distanced from Marx on account of its also being too
much oriented to technical growth of industries and for its stress on
capital just like Adam Smith’s. It could not be true to the Indian economy,
which was pre-capitalist with little machines and markets. Further, Marx’s
opposition seemed to be not against capital but against the capitalist who
usurped it at the cost of workers. This had a historical overtone, which was
not true. To Gandhi history only took discords on its record and not harmony
in society.
Marx had earlier taken
India as a problem of small communities as Asiatic mode of production,
which the Britishers were destroying: “The broad basis of mode of production
here (India) is formed by the unity of small scale agriculture and home
industry, to which In India, we should add the form of village communities
built upon the common ownership of land. But this observation of Marx was
not in tune with his theory, which Lenin was restating in 1917. Maxism
therefore became a more serious debate after Russian Revolution of 1917
under Lenin which occurred fifty years after Marx’s book The Capital.
Marxo-Gandhian Debate in 1930-40’s
The impact of Russian
Revolution in India was not felt except in the form of creation of trade
unions around the cotton mills and outside the Gandhian fold. This was the
course which must happen as capitalism matured. What made Marxian theory
more political than economic was Lenin’s stress on rule of a single Worker’s
Party and a strong intermittent state and the dictatorship of the
proletariat, after the capitalists were liquidated by force. It was too
early for Gandhi to react to such abstract rules of human behavior. Lenin on
the other side treated Gandhian thinking” as a romantic longing for a return
to an idealized medieval world of security and contentment.
But in practice,
Gandhi was not a romantic; he was equally radical as Lenin was; only that
his process was anarchist under the influence of Tolstoy (Resurrection,
1879), Ruskin (Unto This Last, 1860), and Thoreau (Duty of Civil
Disobedience) and under his own convictions. Gandhi’s opposition to
Imperialism was as vehement as Lenin’s but for reasons not Leninist:
“It is the limitless
desire for ever-increased production and ever greater consumption and the
spirit of ruthless competition that impels them to seek colonial possessions
which can be exploited for economic purposes. Here the purposes and
processes of production are primarily directed not to articles of immediate
use but towards exchange between town and country and between metropolis and
colony.”
Khadi
Thus, compared to
Lenin’s Gandhi’s notion was more anti-capital than anti-capitalist. During
the freedom struggle against the British, Gandhi made a case for Khadi as a
device to counter the exploitation of colonial resources for growth of
British mills. The case for Khadi was against both Adam Smith and Marx;
against Adam Smith because poverty could not afford a theory of profit and
loss and human selfishness; and against Marx, because class consciousness
for struggle was not to be left to history, and some immediate alternatives
had to be found out.
Trusteeship concept
He did talk of
Trusteeship concept for the capitalist. But the noncapital stance of Gandhi
eluded the question of economic equality and struggle. It had a village
fetish and aimed at reconstruction of land relations and agricultural
production as the first step to eliminate poverty.
Maoism Versus Gandhism : a New Debate after 1950
The Maoists in China
after World War II blamed Russia to have dumped land workers in the
industrial sack, and to have become equally imperialist. This was a
development, which fructified by declaration of China as a republic in 1949.
Maoism seemed more rural in character than Marxism but its communes were
armed and completely under one man and one party rule.
Gandhism however
persisted for various reasons. The Marxist or Maoist doctrines were imported
dogmas of armed class struggle against poverty. Further they were invariably
supported by army men too. Gandhian process was indigenous and non-violent.
Though slow as a dialectical process, the radicalism in Gandhian Sarvodaya
was more in voluntary action and proper leadership to social action. This
made the problem of leadership more crucial, especially when it had to grow
parallel to state power after Independence.
Bhoodan and Gramdan
A Gandhian follow up
in terms of Bhoodan had come out as a new phase of Gandhian reconstruction
in villages just at a time when planning was already initiated. Voluntary
surrender of some land by landlords for redistribution created a big surplus
mainly in Bihar but its distribution created a big surplus mainly in Bihar
but its distribution could never be complete. The movement was not strong
enough to contain Maoist violence, which was growing, while the
parliamentary system of elected feudal groups and parties mobilized strength
to maintain a status quo. Bhoodan was actually drowned into fast rising
corruption in public life and the political crimes with officials ruling the
roost.
Gramadan was the next
experiment, which was undertaken in Musahari block of Bihar in 1970. It was
actually a hunt for asystem in between Maoism and Gandhism to contain maoist
violence and to transfer land under village ownership . Jai Prakash Narain,
a Marxist turned Gandhian brought the concept as anew village movement of
change and reconstruction in terms of Gramadan (land donated villages). The
strength visualize was of voluntary groups of intellectuals, youth and the
poor men in village panchayats to stand against government as a parallel
force and pull it down the grass root issues.
JP designed yet
another movement in Bihar in 1974 when “freedom is not sacrificed for the
glory of the state or for anything else.” This came out to be another
Gandhian struggle for freedom and the Congress rulers were pulled down
through elections in 1978. But power with the movement-based government
remained strong to corrupt it again in no time.
The Gandhian Crisis
Gandhian economics was
facing a crisis at this juncture. The 4th plan in 1970 floated a poverty
line concept and initiated a number of benefit schemes for the villages
along with its capital-heavy schemes at the centre. There was then a good
section of economists, not Gandhians, which made case for bigger share of
private capital in industry, but protection from outside competition at the
same time. Strangely enough the influence of Chinese revolution was not
traceable, and villages were ignored as seeds of increasing discontent.
The planners were
another non-Gandhian grouped by Jawaharlal Nehru and supported indirectly by
the Marxists. Allowing private ownership in agriculture and small industry,
a mixed economy was conceived with public sector, reaching commanding
heights with time. This actually was a “socialistic” system of the Fabian
variety of Britain with a bias for heavy industry and state power.
Gandhian economics
seemed eclipsed under the spell of the industrialism. The neo-Gandhians, on
the other hand, were scattered lots, engaged in too much of rhetoric and too
little of action. There were some Gandhian political lobbies in parliament
too but it was not such as to change the direction of planning to villages.
The whole reconstruction issue was left over to Planning commission with
Prime Minister as its chairman. This made the participation of people at the
bottom completely lost.
Economics reforms in
the new wake up went further off from Gandhian economics. The richer nations
were growing oligarchic and protectionists again with quasi colonial
policies for developing nations. The prevented benefits to reach villages
and the island of richness remained surrounded by vast ocean of poverty
around it.
Gandhi’s system yet
demanded the fulfillment of basic needs of the protest in villages, which
could have a capillary action onwards, like the wave circles of water.
Swadeshi economics thus stood for countering the effects of fast industrial
growth, which was by its very nature limited and concentrated in areas and
turned to the needs of rich markets.
While capitalism
strives one-sidedly for efficiency in producing goods, Maoism in numerous
ways builds on the worst. Experts are pushed aside in favour of
decision-making by the masses; new industries are established in rural
areas; the education system favours the disadvantages; expertise or work
proficiency, in the narrow sense, is discouraged; new products are
domestically produced rather than imported more efficiently, growth of
cities as centers of industrial and cultural life is discouraged, steel for
a time is made by every one instead of by the much more efficient industry.
Further , “the effort spent on building on the worst will eventually pay off
not only in economic ways by raising labour productivity but, more
important, by creating a society of truly free men” This is what the
Gandhian Swadeshi would also stand for. The difference between the two
systems looks quite fluid at many points.
Some Observations
In fact, there were
are two Marxs Today finds Karl Marx in his books Grundrisse (or Outline of
National Economy translated in 1930), talking about many classes, each
alienating the other (and not only two warnings classes in a theory of
exploitation as conceived by Engles in Marx’s Das Kapital). The alienation
was of course due to scarcity. Hegel had actually given a dialectical method
of “the ascendant movements of man to higher and more nature social forms
when the reactionaries saw nothing but repetition of the old, nothing but
stagnation.”
Some policy frame has
yet to be developed on the Gandhian norms of what Jan Tinbergen would call
“simplicity and austerity”. Would it mean a self-reliant Swadeshi movement
in villages, which cover 80% of the economy, and its planning by the local
people themselves? Swadeshi may be redefined as production and trade within
village centres with an optimal spatial map of centres of defined sizes and
ranks and distances. Will the present governments empower them for that with
60% of its resources flowing to the local centres of power? Gandhism would
seek these issues to be resolved.
References
Source: Anasakti Darshan Vol. 2, July-December 2006 |
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